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Shafia family members guilty of first-degree murder

KINGSTON, ONT.—This is blessed Canada. They won’t be “hoisted onto the gallows,’’ But they’re going to prison for life.

Mohammad Shafia: Guilty on four counts of first-degree murder.

After 15 hours of deliberation, the jury of five men and seven women returned with their verdict. Justice &mdash; 31 months removed from mass homicide at the Kingston Mills Locks. (Graham Hughes / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

On Sunday afternoon, after 15 hours of deliberation, the jury of five men and seven women returned with their verdict. Justice — 31 months removed from mass homicide at the Kingston Mills Locks. Justice and vindication for Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia and for Rona Amir Mohammad, Rosie DiManno and Andrew Chung write. (Graham Hughes / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

<p>On Sunday afternoon, after 15 hours of deliberation, the jury of five men and seven women returned with their verdict. Justice &mdash; 31 months removed from mass homicide at the Kingston Mills Locks.Justice <em>and</em> vindication for Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, for Rona Amir Mohammad, writes Rosie DiManno.</p> (THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Tooba Mohammad Yahya: Guilty on four counts of first-degree murder.

Hamed Shafia: Guilty on four counts of first degree murder.

In our country, men and women are equal. A female’s life is worth as much as a male’s.

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In our country, femicide is homicide.

In our country, even the most wicked and palpably culpable of defendants are guaranteed a fair trial, a vigorous defence, which is what these three grotesque individuals got, with all the courtesy and respect court could offer.

On Sunday afternoon, after 15 hours of deliberation, a jury of five men and seven women sealed the fate of the accused.

Glaring at the defendants, now the convicted felons, the judge intoned: “It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous, more honourless crime.

“There is nothing more honourless than the deliberate murder of, in the case of Mohammad Shafia, three of his daughters and his wife; in the case of Tooba Yahya, three of her daughters and a stepmother to all her children; in the case of Hamed Shafia, three of his sisters and a mother.

“The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your twisted concept of honour, a notion of honour that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honour that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.

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“For these crimes, for these murders, the sentence is mandatory as set out in the Criminal Code of Canada — imprisonment without eligibility of parole for a period of 25 years — and that’s the sentence of the court for each of you.’’

Justice and vindication for Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, for Rona Amir Mohammad.

Justice — the best legal representation they could afford and presumption of innocence for all the accused — but a final day of reckoning for them at the Frontenac County Courthouse.

They’d waited for the verdict in the basement cell. It arrived at just after 2 p.m. From the flat expressions on the faces of the accused, it was obvious they sensed what the decision would be.

The other surviving children of the Shafia parents — one of whom had testified for the defence, the other who had rushed into the courtroom last week and planted a kiss on the glass partition behind the defendants — were not present.

Mohammad Shafia is 59.

Tooba Mohammad Yahya is 42.

Hamed Shafia is 21.

They did not have the good grace to bow their heads in shame. Instead, they protested their innocence.

At precisely 1:58 p.m., the jury filed in, their seating arrangement altered so that the designated foreman could address the court from closest to the judge’s bench. The panel’s verdict was handed to a court official who presented it to Maranger. It was then read aloud by the foreman.

Mohammad Shafia, as on the indictment, heard his fate first: “The verdict is guilty of first-degree murder.’’

At that point, Hamed, who had shown no emotion throughout the trial and never took the stand in his own defence, raised his hands to his face and began weeping. Shafia first rubbed gently at his son’s back, then patted the top of his head. An honourable boy, as Shafia had indicated on the wiretaps, his pride and joy.

Perhaps, if some mercy can be spared for a killer, a victim himself of the cultural misogyny that condemned his sisters and surrogate mother to a horrible death. Bad Afghan boys don’t end up drowned in a canal. Bad Afghan boys can stay out till 3 a.m. with their little brothers and not get slapped across the face for it. As Crown Attorney Laurie Lacelle had told the jury in her closing submissions: “The rules are different for boys. They couldn’t become sexually compromised. They couldn’t become whores.’’

Tooba, didn’t move a muscle as she heard her fate. Then came Hamed, standing between his parents, leaning heavily on the railing.

All made statements to the court, when invited to do so.

Shafia: “Your honour, we are not criminals. We are not murderers. We didn’t commit the murder. This is injust.’’

Tooba: “I’m not a murderer. I am a mother, a mother.’’

Hamed: “Sir, I did not drown my sisters anywhere.’’

Only after the judge and jury had left, the youngest juror crying, did the convicted killers turn to each other. Tooba stared daggers at her husband. Then she, too, sobbed into her palms before manacles were once more placed on all their wrists.

Defence counsel for Tooba and Hamed made it clear the verdicts would be appealed. This is a routine step in first-degree murder convictions.

Peter Kemp, lawyer for Shafia, said afterwards: “He wasn’t convicted for what he did. He was convicted for what he said.’’

The albatross police wiretaps — as close to a smoking gun as it got.

The Shafia sisters were still in their teens when their lives came to an end in the early morning hours of June 30, 2009. Gorgeous Zainab was 19. Sultry Sahar was 17. Rebellious Geeti was 13. And Rona, sad, doomed, betrayed Rona, Shafia’s first wife in a clandestinely polygamous Afghan marriage, was 52.

Remember them. The jury did.

Before his arrest, patriarch Mohammad Shafia had declared boastfully on the intercepts, oozing self-righteousness: “Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows . . . nothing is more dear to me than my honour.’’

No doubt that thought will keep him warm at night in his jail cell.

But who thought of the crime first, to eliminate half the Shafia family?

Lacelle, addressing the jury, speculated it had been the patriarch, Shafia, a man of diminutive proportions, wizened, who looks like a gnome, a lawn ornament: “It was Shafia who set the plan in motion and offered the first concept for the murders — drowning.’’

As trials go, jurors faced a complex task. They had to consider more than three months of proceedings, including the testimony of 58 witnesses, 165 exhibits, physical evidence, forensics, wiretaps, laptop searches and diametrically opposing arguments from the Crown and the defence.

At the core of the trial was the key question: Were the deaths the result of a tragic car accident, as the defence contended, or murder driven by outrage over family honour besmirched?

The criminal chronicles of Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona began on the morning of June 30, 2009, when the family’s newly purchased second-hand Nissan Sentra was found submerged in a lock at Kingston Mills. A civilian diver subsequently discovered people floating inside.

This grisly discovery would eventually lead to first-degree murder charges for each of the defendants and national hand-wringing over the phenomenon of “honour killings’’ imported to Canada from abroad.

At trial, where opening statements began on Oct. 20, the prosecution would formalize its theory that this was not just a mass murder, but a mass honour killing, provoked by the victims’ behaviour — conduct so offensive to parents and brother (and, in Rona’s case, husband) that homicide was the only remedy, a toxic salve for the Shafia reputation.

At the trial’s conclusion, Maranger instructed the jury they were to find the defendants guilty of either first-degree or second-degree murder or not guilty. A finding of manslaughter was not an option.

First-degree murder would imply premeditation. In the case of second degree, the planning element would not apply. Both mean life sentences, but with no chance of parole for 25 years in first-degree murder and parole after anywhere from 10 to 25 years for second-degree, at the discretion of the judge.

Would that have made a difference for these convicted felons? For Hamed, no doubt, but even facing a quarter century behind bars, he’d still be only in his mid-40s upon release.

A finding that one or more of the accused aided or abetted the principle offender in the case would still apply to either first or second-degree murder, Maranger had explained to the jury last Friday, in his lengthy instructions.

He also reminded the jury, as did the Crown, that although an abundance of evidence was presented to that effect, a “motive’’ — honour killing as argued by the Crown — was neither needed nor proof required.

The case had revolved, as the judge noted, on a “great deal of circumstantial evidence.’’

The Crown said all three defendants participated in and contributed to a planned mass murder. They searched the Internet on such subjects as “where to commit a murder,’’ and scouted out sites, prosecutors documented. They chose the locks at Kingston Mills on a return family trip from Niagara Falls. They drowned their intimates somewhere on the site, placed them in the Nissan and attempted to tip that vehicle off the precipice of the northern-most lock. The Nissan got caught up on the concrete ledge, however, and the Lexus was deployed to push the smaller vehicle into the water.

That episode, unplanned, obviously, caused damage to the Lexus’ headlamp, pieces of which were found at the canal and in Montreal where Hamed admitted to staging an accident with a guard rail in a parking lot, specifically to cover up damage to the SUV. Damage to the two vehicles would later be matched up by accident reconstruction experts.

Intercepted communications also recorded Shafia using caustic language to refer to his daughters, calling them “treacherous’’ and “whores.’’

And he was unrepentant: “Even if they come back to life a hundred times, if I have a cleaver in my hand, I will (them) to pieces. Not once but a hundred times. . . .

“If we remain alive one night or one year, we have no tension in our hearts, (thinking that) our daughter is in the arms of this or that boy, in the arms of this or that man. God curse their graduation! Curse of God on both of them (Zainab and Sahar), on their kind. God’s curses on them for a generation.

“May the devil s--t on their graves! Is that what a daughter should be? What a daughter be such a whore?’’

For the trio of defence counsel, this was always portrayed as a dreadful accident, with a confused Zainab, who had no license, at the wheel, driving the Nissan catastrophically into the canal.

That it was an honour killing, said Patrick McCann, who represented Hamed, was “preposterous.’’

Kemp offered a timeline that suggested four people couldn’t have been drowned with enough time to spare such that Hamed could be back in Montreal by 6:48 a.m., when he took a call on his cellphone in that city, information retrieved from the unit. The prosecution dismantled that proposal, countering with a different timeline.

Hamed was wisely kept off the stand. But Tooba testified and tried to deflect suspicion from her dear boy, even if that meant throwing her husband under the bus.

And Shafia, who dabbed a handkerchief to his eyes at various junctures of the trial, maintained innocence on the stand, but cut the victims, Zainab and Sahar especially, no slack for their sins. God, he said, had chosen the time and place of their death.

His conscience, as the intercepts showed beyond a doubt, was at peace: “I (am) happy and my conscience is clear. They haven’t done good and God punished them. My conscience, my God, my religion, my creed, aren’t shameful. Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows . . . nothing is more dear to me than my honour.’’

So perchance he will console himself with that.

Outside court afterwards, Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis, clearly exhausted by the long trial, but rejuvenated by the outcome, said: “This verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and the core principles in a free and democratic society that all Canadians enjoy and even visitors to Canada enjoy.’’

Lead investigator Det. Sgt. Chris Scott praised the Crown lawyers for allowing the four victims to finally be heard.

“They gave these victims a voice when they had none and I appreciate their work.’’

On those damning wiretaps, Shafia had advised and reassured his son: “We are not ashamed of our conscience, neither you nor I nor your mother. Be like a man. Your mother is also like a man. . . Even if, God forbid, they hoist us onto the gallows.

“Don’t think about it, don’t worry about it, whatever the eventuality, it is from God. We accept it wholeheartedly.

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